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THE NEW YORKER, MAY 30, 2016
culture has never been oppressed.' "
Pressman laughed. "I'm, like, 'Really?
The Holocaust?' "
O , one spring after-
noon, I met up with Megan Bau-
tista, a co-liaison in Oberlin's student
government. Elsewhere, her position
would have been student-body presi-
dent, but Oberlin is down on hierar-
chy---also on the authoritarian tenden-
cies of solo leadership---so she was a
liaison, and she shared the role with a
young man. We got a co ee at the Local
Co ee & Tea, a belowground shop
popular mostly because it has good ba-
gels and is not Slow Train. Bautista,
who was finishing her fifth and final
year, devoted a lot of time to activism,
and she told me that she had lost in-
terest in hanging out with people who
didn't share her views. "I do think
that there's something to be said about
exposing yourself to ideas other than
your own, but I've had enough of that
after my fifth year," she said. She was
exhausted.
Bautista identifies as "Afro-Latinx."
(The "x" signifies independence from
overdetermined gender roles.) She grew
up in the Bronx and attended the ex-
clusive private school Fieldston, thanks
to a recruitment program for gifted
kids. She didn't do much activism there.
"There just wasn't a critical mass of
students of color who wanted the same
things," she said. "I was very much still
in the Du Bois, I'm-gonna-sit-back-
and-read-my-things state." At Ober-
lin, Bautista's sense of urgency sharp-
ened. She was on campus in early ,
when flagrantly bigoted flyers, posters,
and gra ti appeared over a period of
weeks. (Two undergraduates are said
to have been responsible, one of whom
told police that it was "a joke to see the
college overreact.") The episode led to
the cancellation of all classes for a day,
and galvanized many students. "I don't
want to say we were ahead of the curve
or anything, but we were starting this
trend of millennial activism," Bautista
told me.
The movement quickly fizzled. She
explained, "A lot of people here are the
first in their families, or in the position
where they really have to be the bread-
winners as soon as they graduate." They
didn't have the luxury of hours for un-
paid activism. Protest surged again
in the fall of , after the killing of
Tamir Rice. "A lot of us worked alongside
community members in Cleveland who
were protesting. But we needed to or-
ganize on campus as well---it wasn't
sustainable to keep driving forty min-
utes away. A lot of us started su ering
academically." In , Oberlin had
modified its grading standards to ac-
commodate activism around the Viet-
nam War and the Kent State shoot-
ings, and Bautista had hoped for
something similar. More than thirteen
hundred students signed a petition call-
ing for the college to eliminate any
grade lower than a C for the semester,
but to no avail. "Students felt really un-
supported in their endeavors to engage
with the world outside Oberlin," she
told me.
It is sometimes said that the new
activists are naïve about the demands
of the real world. But as I talked with
Eosphoros and Bautista and other stu-
dents I began to wonder whether they
were noticing an ideological incongru-
ity some older people weren't. A school
like Oberlin, which prides itself on
being the first to have regularly ad-
mitted women and black students, ex-
plicitly values diversity. But it's also
supposed to lift students out of their
circumstances, diminishing di erence.
Under a previous ideal, one that drew
on terms such as "a rmative action,"
students like Eosphoros and Bautista
would have been made to feel lucky
just to be in school.Today, they are told
that they belong there, but they also
must take on an extracurricular respon-
sibility: doing the work of diversity.
They move their lives to rural Ohio
and perform their identities, whatever
that might mean. They bear out the
school's vision. In exchange, they're
groomed for old-school entry into the
liberal upper middle class. An irony
surrounds the whole endeavor, and a
lot of students seemed to see it.
"Oberlin does a really good job of
analyzing intersectionality in the class-
room---even in discussions, people are
aware of who's talking, who's taking up
space," Kiley Petersen, a junior, told me.
"But there's a disconnect in trying to
apply these frames of intersectionality
and progressive change to departments
and this school as a whole." Some stu-
dents have sought their own solutions.
Earlier this year, a sophomore, Chloe
Vassot, published an essay in the college
paper urging white students like her to
speak up less in class in certain circum-
stances. "I understand that I am not
just an individual concerned only with
"They ri ed through our drawers, ransacked our closets, and completely
redeveloped the central character in Carlton's novel."
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